Trump’s self-congratulation for his response to last year’s devastation of Puerto Rico, even as Carolina residents brace for one of the worst Atlantic storms in history, sums up the callousness and criminality of the American ruling class.

The end of the current generation of environmental satellites will likely produce a gap lasting up to four years, in which crucial data used in predicting the intensity of hurricanes will not be collected.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which drew to a close in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, last Friday, has been denounced by environmental advocates as a “hoax” and “an epic failure.” Despite already low expectations before the meeting, the summit testifies to the stagnation in global efforts to address the looming climate crisis.

An international group of scientists published a review article in the latest issue of Nature arguing that the human impact on the Earth's biosphere could lead to an ecological disaster in as little as a few generations.

United Nations-sponsored climate change negotiations in Cancún, Mexico concluded last Saturday without any agreement between the more than 190 national government delegations on binding carbon emissions reduction targets.

Liberal leader Tony Abbott last week released the opposition coalition’s new climate change policy, pledging to establish a multi-billion dollar public fund to be placed at the disposal of the largest corporate polluters and agribusiness interests.

The problems of climate change are so profound and far-reaching that they require the rational mobilisation of all available economic, material, scientific and technical resources, something that is only possible only under socialism.

Public meetings called by the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) in Sydney and Melbourne last week exposed the real agenda behind emissions trading schemes and the official climate change “debate”. The following is the report delivered by WSWS writer Patrick O’Connor.

Danish police battled demonstrators outside the world climate conference in Copenhagen, while inside the delegates of the imperialist powers, China, India and dozens of less developed countries clashed over conflicting proposals to deal with pollution caused by industrialization, deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels.

An international group of leading climate scientists has updated the 2007 IPCC report based on the substantial body of scientific research published over the past three years. Their conclusions not only confirm the trends reported in 2007, but in a number of key areas exceed previous expectations.